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Windows Azure and Small Business

I met a very successful entrepreneur today for lunch. Following are excerpts from the brief discussions I had with him during lunch.

Qs: How many people are working for you now in your organization? Ans: Over 40 people.

I was surprised to hear this. Over 40 is a decent number at India. So I asked him It must be a fairly large space. Having a office space as big as 40 in Bangalore , India is not a joke. Qs: Where is your office located? Ans :It is virtual office and I have people sitting at their houses and working for me.

I was all thrilled but did not wanted to shower him with lots of questions during our friendly lunch meet. Qs: Do you have tools that facilitate you this. Ans: Yes he said , we have “Windows Server 2008 R2” to facilitate our virtual organization.

It is indeed true that there are numerous successful people working in virtual organization methodology.

My interest was initially about virtual organization and software system that supports virtual organization. But when I researched, I even found that hospitals patients records are getting virtual. Surprised? — don’t be . You can find more details about Microsoft health care systems.

Microsoft Window Azure is a great tool that support virtual organization and it’s concept. One can even now leave the infrastructure overheads and only concentrate on the core business development.

Every organization is concerned about the data and source code, especially if you are in the business of IT development. The employers are bound by law and contract terms with the buyers/users to keep the data safe and are responsible even if the employees do the damage. However risk of loosing software code can be minimized to near 5% , if you use Microsoft tools to manage your development infrastructure. Big companies do have allocated budget for managing their own data security but small and medium companies mostly work on trust. However trust is something that comes over a period by monitoring his or her activities in direct. Hence it was not really possible until now to have control over the source code and other sensitive data unless the employee was trustworthy.

With cloud emerging as one of the best ways to manage virtual organization, it is quite possible to have control over source code and data.

I will be blogging more on utilizing Windows Azure cloud as a platform to drive your virtual organization on my forth coming posts. Please leave you valuable comments and opinions to improve my blog posts and keep coming back for more.

What I want to know is why I should care agile virtual and outsourcing? I mean, not to say that what youve got to say isnt important, but I mean, its so generic. Everyones is talking about this topic. Give us something more, something that we can get behind becoming agile virtual, so we can feel as passionately about it as you do.

Virtual Organization Management Institute is the world’s leading and only global 100% virtual educational institute, think tank, professional association, certification and accreditation provider, and conference producer strictly focused on the modern virtual organization management discipline pioneered by its founder since 1997.

Teamwork has been around since before our ancestors gathered up their spears and learned how to work together to gang up on mastodons and saber-toothed tigers. Many experts agree that teams are the primary unit of performance in any organization. Today there is a new kind of team—a “virtual” team made up of people who communicate electronically. Its members may hardly ever see each other in person. In fact, they may never meet at all, except in cyberspace.

The Virtual Organizations as Sociotechnical Systems (VOSS) program supports fundamental scientific research, particularly advances in social, organizational and design science, directed at advancing the understanding of how to develop effective virtual organizations and under what conditions virtual organizations can enable and enhance scientific, engineering, and education production and innovation. VOSS funded research must be grounded in theory and rooted in empirical methods. It must produce broadly applicable and transferable results that augment knowledge and practice of virtual organizations as a modality. VOSS supported projects that use functioning organizations as data sources are encouraged, but should be designed such that the findings extend beyond that unit and sample. VOSS does not support proposals that aim to implement or evaluate individual virtual organizations.

This organizational type assigns each worker two bosses in two different hierarchies. One hierarchy is “functional” and assures that each type of expert in the organization is well-trained, and measured by a boss who is super-expert in the same field. The other direction is “executive” and tries to get projects completed using the experts. Projects might be organized by products, regions, customer types, or some other schema.

The flattening and decentering of organizations raise challenges for organizing in a virtual setting. The very technologies that offer employees the freedom to work anytime and anywhere also detracts from the creation of a shared reality essential for the formation of stable work expectations. Many organizational cues that served as the basis for the creation of a shared reality among employees (including dress codes, shared language, and shared organizational routines) are less readily available in a virtual setting. Consequently, there is a danger that organizations operating in a virtual system could be pulled apart by the centripetal forces that so heavily influence virtual organizations. Stated differently, although virtual work enables an organization as a system of work, it has the potential to constrain an organization as a system of meaning for its virtual participants. And, it is this area that researchers and practitioners might want to focus on to create greater benefits from new emerging work forms such as virtual work.